Before we stop sucking, I need to impart a little news to you. I have recently been named the Blog Manager of IMP. This means, for all you team members, I get to pester you to blog and I get to mess with your post before it goes live. Don’t worry, I won’t be evil with it, I’ll just make it not suck, which I’ll get to in a bit.
For you, loyal reader, it hopefully means more and better posts. I haven’t been doing a stupefyingly stellar job as of yet, but I hope I can get off my hiney and actually get to work now. This post should help with that, because part of the reason I’m writing it is to give myself some guidelines on editing posts. The other half, of course, is so those posts suck even less than they do now when they come under my nose for review. Now, on to the suckitude, and how to prevent it.
These are actually inspired by a journalism class I took last semester. Many of the concepts transfer easily to blogging, so it wasn’t too much work to come up with this simple set of guidelines.
There are three main elements of a post: Mechanics, Structure, and Content. They’re in the order of ease of correction, so you should at least read the beginning. Speaking of beginnings, let’s begin. (more…)
